signed her office
to Babette, the housemaid, and sought her room. Agnes Darling still
slept--the merciful sleep Doctor Frank's opiate had given her.

CHAPTER IX.

A GAME FOR TWO TO PLAY AT.

A cold, raw, rainy, dismal morning--the sky black and hopeless of
sunshine, the long bleak blasts complaining around the old house, and
rattling ghostily the skeleton trees. The rain was more sleet than rain;
for it froze as it fell, and clattered noisily against the blurred
window-glass. A morning for hot coffee and muffins, and roaring fires
and newspapers and easy-chairs, and in which you would not have the
heart to turn your enemy's dog from the door.

Doctor Danton stood this wild and wintry February morning at his chamber
window, looking out absently at the slanting sleet, not thinking of
it--not thinking of the pale blank of wet mist shrouding the distant
fields and marshes, and village and river, but of something that made
him knit his brows in perplexed, reflection.

"What was it she saw last, night?" he mused. "No spectre of the
imagination, and no bona-fide ghost. Old Margery saw something, and now
Agnes. I wonder--"

He stopped, there was a knock at the door.

"Come in," he said, and Grace entered.

"I did not know you were up," said Grace. "But it is very fortunate as
it happens. I have just been to Miss Darling's room, and she is crying
out for you in the wildest Manner."

"Ah!" said her brother, rising, "has she been awake long?"

"Nearly an hour, Babette tells me, and all that time she has been
frantically calling for you. Her manner is quite frenzied, and I fear--"

"What do you fear?"

"That last night's fright has disordered her reason."

"Heaven forbid! I will go to her at once."

He left the room as he spoke, and ran upstairs to the chamber of the
seamstress. The gray morning twilight stole drearily through the closed
shutter, and the lamp burned dim and dismal still. Babette sat by the
bedside trying to soothe her charge in very bad English, and evidently
but with little success. The bed-clothes had been tossed off, the little
thin hands closed and unclosed in them--the great dark eyes were wide
and wild--the black hair all tossed and disordered on the pillow.

Babette rose precipitately at the Doctor's entrance.

"Here's the Doctor, Mees Darling. May I go now, Monsieur?"

"Yes, you may go; but remain outside, in case I should, want you."

He shut the door on Babette, and took her